A new novel of mine, The Ash Tree, has been published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it recounts the lives of an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family as it builds a new life in California.

There are three other novels of mine - one is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962, which is as yet unpublished; another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse; and Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable - is my political novella (with eight stories) from Amazon's Createspace, about Israel and its reactions to the first Iraq War in 1990 (with the fear then that Saddam Hussein's missile bombardment might contain a nuclear weapon).From a review of "Acts" on Amazon.com:"At times the reader races ahead to find out the fate of the cast of characters and the fate of nations. At others the reader is stopped mid-page to consider the paradoxes of the nuclear world and the world of realpolitik. This is an important, timely book that deserves a wide audience." For a fuller description of them, look for the relevant blog posts below or click on one of the Amazon.com links. KINDLE editions of these novels are also available.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Beethoven's "Sound World" - i

I’d like to try to develop the idea of the “sound world” a composer creates and inhabits – and which we listeners are privileged to inhabit with him or her. In the first posts, I'll try to establish how I was initiated into the sounds of classical music and particularly Beethoven. My parents were devoted to classical music. My father played the violin, and there were frequent “quartet evenings” at our house, during which he played second violin, for the most part. Undoubtedly, I heard his quartet play some Beethoven during my childhood, though it was not until I was a teenager that I clearly recollect hearing him play some of the opus 18 quartets. My mother played the piano, and the Beethoven sonata she turned to most often was the early opus 7 (again, I clearly remember her performance only when I was a teenager).

There were several record players in the house, and undoubtedly the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and his other symphonies must have filled the house. (I certainly remember opera emanating from the Girard in my brother David’s room, starting when he was 13 and I was 8; there were choral sounds – perhaps the “Ode to Joy” movement of the Ninth, probably the recording by Toscanini, who obsessed the family – emerging from my 16-year-old brother Philip’s room at the other end of the upstairs hall.) The Melnick household was turbulent and confusing for an eight year old, and though I loved the presence of music there, it was difficult to concentrate and fully absorb it, given my spry, distracted disposition as well as my circumstances (in which adolescents and adults would act like children, even as the child was made to witness and experience adult intensities).

During the year I was 8, then (that would be 1951-2), there were piano lessons I took, which taught me not much beyond the basics. At the age of 11, lessons were resumed, and I began playing simple Haydn minuets, Clementi’s easier sonatas, etc. It was not until I was 14 that I initiated resuming lessons and began truly exploring the keyboard music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. By then, my brothers had moved out of the house, and things were a bit more stable; I lived with my parents in West Los Angeles, and then in 1958 we moved to the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, a block from the V.A. hospital where my physician father worked. During the next three years from the age of 14 to 17, when I went away to college, my love of music fully flowered.

A German-Jewish émigré drove from Brentwood in West L.A. through the Valley to our remote Sylmar home to give me weekly lessons. Mr. Schumann assigned me typical fare: Bach Inventions and then a Partita, Mozart sonatas, the Scenes of Childhood by Schumann (no relation), and of course some Beethoven sonatas – first the easy opus 49 sonatas and then opus 90, not hard but not easy. More important than his assignments and instruction (comprised of encouraging advice mostly about interpretation rather than technique), Mr. Schumann loved to play the piano for me, so during the last twenty minutes of each session, he would fill our suburban tract home with music – above all, Beethoven. He was preparing the Waldstein sonata, opus 53, to play in recital, and at the end of several lessons I heard him perform the wonderful pulse and whir of the sonata’s repetitions – its pulsing chords and whirring arpeggios and continually unfolding melodic motifs. These mini-recitals, with my sitting to one side of him and turning pages, constituted a crucial education for me.

Also, in these years, I finally had my own small portable record player. I particularly remember receiving individual records discarded by my older brother Philip, whose record collection burgeoned with new boxed sets. Among the LPs were recordings of Klemperer (the cover photo showing one half of his face bright and benign, the other shadowed and sinister) conducting the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, Szell conducting Schubert’s “Great” Symphony, Schnabel playing Schubert’s last piano sonata, and much else. I was particularly stirred by the record of Egon Petri playing Beethoven’s last three sonatas. The LP prompted me to work through those compositions time after time – I played them at a slower than indicated pace, but at whatever tempo they gave me great pleasure. Petri’s record educated me about what I would later want to call Beethoven’s organic form – his capacity to shape motifs so that they constantly grew, even as they contributed their energy to the encompassing arc of a movement’s structure. I came finally to understand the nature and power of form – whether sonata, variation, fugue, aria, or dance.

Buy "Hungry Generations" here - a novel about L.A. and European expatriates living there.

Purchase "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music" here.

About Me

"The Ash Tree" about a family of Armenian-Americans, from 1915 to the early 1970s, is being published April 24, 2015, on the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. My 2004 novel "Hungry Generations" is about the encounter between a young composer in L.A. in the 70s and the family of a great virtuoso pianist, who knew Schoenberg and Stravinsky there in the 40s. Also, there's my critical book on modern fiction and music, "Fullness of Dissonance" (1994), as well as various stories and articles in print. My novella and story collection "Acts of Terror and Contrition" was published in 2011. Current projects: "Pathological States" (an unpublished novel), "Conrad in the Twentieth Century" and "Beethoven and modernity" (both non-fiction books). I'm married to the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick, whose paintings are on the cover of three of my books. You can contact me either by leaving a comment on a post or at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.